Book reviews

One Thousand Roads to Mecca. Michael Wolfe (Ed.), 1997. New York, Grove Press. 620 pp., hb. $32.50, ISBN 0 8021 1611 6

Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: Al‐Yunini's Dhayl Mir'at al‐zaman. Li Guo, 1998. Leiden, E.J. Brill. 2 vols, 241 pp. and xv + 338 pp. Arabic, hb. n.p., ISBN 90 04 11028 3 and 90 04 11029 1

Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu'tazilism from medieval school to modern symbol. Richard C. Martin & Mark R. Woodward with Dwi S. Atmaja, 1997. Oxford, Oneworld Publications. xv+ 251 pp., pb. £14.99/$22.95, ISBN 1 85168 147 7

Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought. Daniel Brown, 1996. Cambridge Middle East Studies 5. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. x+ 185 pp., hb. n.p., ISBN 0 521 57077 8

Ebu's su'ud, the Islamic Legal Tradition. Colin Imber, 1997. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. 288 pp., hb. £40.00, ISBN 07486 0767 6

Islam and the West: the making of an Image. Norman Daniel, 1997 (1993). Oxford, Oneworld. 467 pp., pb. $25.95/£16.99, ISBN I 85168 129 8

Exegesis as Polemical Discourse: Ibn Hazm on Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Theodore Pulcini, 1998. Atlanta, GA, Scholars Press. 216 pp., hb. $44.95, ISBN 0 7885 0396 0; pb. $19.95, ISBN 0 7885 0395 2

Christians and Jews under Islam. Youssef Courbage & Philippe Fargues, trans. Judy Mabro, 1997. London and New York, I.B. Tauris. xii + 242 pp., hb. £39.50, ISBN 1 86064 013 3

The Construction of Nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationhood. Adrian Hastings, 1997. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 235 pp., pb. £12.95, ISBN 0 521 62544 0

Muslim Identity and Balkan State. Hugh Poulton & Suha Taji‐Farouki (Eds), 1997. London, Hurst & Co.. 250 pp., hb. n.p., ISBN 1 85065 276 7; pb. n.p., ISBN 1 85065 348 8

Turkish and Other Muslim Minorities of Bulgaria. Ali Eminov, 1997. London, Hurst & Co.. 218 pp., hb. £25, ISBN 1 85065 319 4

Al‐yahūd fi misr min al‐fath al‐'uthmani hatta awa'il al‐qarn al‐tas’ ‘ashar. [History of the Jewish Community in Egypt from the Ottoman Invasion to the. Beginning of the Nineteenth Century] (Arabic). Mohsen Shouman, 1996. Cairo, privately printed (available from the author, Department of History, College of. Arts, University of Zaqaziq, Egypt). 492 pp., n.p., no ISBN

The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: the rise of an Islamic mass movement 1928–1942. Brynjar Lia, 1998. Reading, Ithaca. 272 pp., hb, £30.00, ISBN 0 86372 220 2

African Islam and Islam in Africa: encounters between Sufis and Islamists. David Westerlund & Eva Evers Rosander (Eds), 1997. London, Hurst & Co.. 347 pp., hb. £40, ISBN 85065 282 1; pb. £15.95, ISBN 1 85065 281 3

Transforming Female Identities: women's organizational forms in West Africa/Transformation des identités feminines: formes d'organisations feminines en Afrique de l'Ouest. Eva Evers Rosander (Ed.), 1997. Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet 243 pp., pb. £18.95, ISBN 91 7106 403 6

The Pure and the Powerful. Nadia Abu‐Zahra, 1977. Reading, Ithaca, NY. xx+ 320 pp., hb. £35.00, ISBN 0 86372 179 6     

Associative learning in baboons (Papio papio) and humans (Homo sapiens): species differences in learned attention to visual features

We examined attention shifting in baboons and humans during the learning of visual categories. Within a conditional matching-to-sample task, participants of the two species sequentially learned two two-feature categories which shared a common feature. Results showed that humans encoded both features of the initially learned category, but predominantly only the distinctive feature of the subsequently learned category. Although baboons initially encoded both features of the first category, they ultimately retained only the distinctive features of each category. Empirical data from the two species were analyzed with the 1996 ADIT connectionist model of Kruschke. ADIT fits the baboon data when the attentional shift rate is zero, and the human data when the attentional shift rate is not zero. These empirical and modeling results suggest species differences in learned attention to visual features. Received: 30 May 1998 / Accepted after revision: 13 September 1998     

The criterion-related validity of the Childhood Autism Rating Scale and the Autism Behavior checklist

The present study sought to examine the relationship between two popular instruments for screening autistic children: the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) and the Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC). The sample included 77 individuals. The records of 48 subjects contained firm diagnoses of autism, while the suggestion of autism was found in the remaining records. Correlations between the two scales ranged from –.16 to .73 (median=.39). The validity coefficient between the two total scores was .67. Using cutoff scores recommended by the authors, an analysis of the sensitivity of the two instruments was conducted. The CARS correctly identified 98% of the autistic subjects; it identified 69% of the possibly autistic as autistic. The ABC correctly identified 88% of the autistic subjects, while it identified 48% of those subjects considered possibly autistic as autistic. A phi coefficient was computed to estimate the degree of relationship between the nominal classifications produced by the two instruments. A moderate relationship was found, (r = .54). Implications of the results are discussed.     

Individual differences in working memory strategies for reading expository text

This study investigated whether individual differences in working memory (WM) span are associated with different WM management strategies during the reading of expository text. In Experiment 1, probe questions were presented on line during reading to determine whether thematic information was maintained in WM throughout comprehension. The data indicated that readers across the range of WM span maintained thematic information in WM throughout the reading of a given passage. In Experiment 2, sentence reading times and accuracy for both topic and detail questions were measured in two conditions: when topic sentences were present and when topic sentences were absent. Subjects performed similarly across the range of WM span in the topic-present condition, but lower span subjects performed more poorly on detail questions in the topic-absent condition. In Experiment 3, the topic-present condition of the second experiment was replicated, except that subjects expected to receive questions about details only. Thematic processing and retention of topic and detail information all increased with span. Taken together, these results suggest that, for more difficult text processing tasks, high- and low-span subjects adopt different WM management strategies and these strategies influence what is learned from reading the text.     

Community violence, family conflict, and preschoolers' socioemotional functioning

This study examined the relations among family conflict, community violence, and young children's socioemotional functioning and explored how children's social cognition and mothers' psychological functioning may mediate the outcomes associated with this exposure. Mothers of 431 Head Start preschoolers completed questionnaires about their family demography, exposure to community violence, family conflict, and children's distress symptoms. Children were administered a social cognition assessment, and teachers rated their behavior. Results showed that mothers' reports of children's co-witnessing of community violence were positively associated with police department crime rates, children's distress symptoms, and teachers' ratings of aggression. A path analysis revealed that children's social awareness and mothers' depressive symptoms partially mediated the effects of community violence and family conflict on outcomes for children.     

Depth perception: cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) respond to visual texture density gradients

Studies concerning the perceptual processes of animals are not only interesting, but are fundamental to the understanding of other developments in information processing among non-humans. Carefully used visual illusions have been proven to be an informative tool for understanding visual perception. In this behavioral study, we demonstrate that cuttlefish are responsive to visual cues involving texture gradients. Specifically, 12 out of 14 animals avoided swimming over a solid surface with a gradient picture that to humans resembles an illusionary crevasse, while only 5 out of 14 avoided a non-illusionary texture. Since texture gradients are well-known cues for depth perception in vertebrates, we suggest that these cephalopods were responding to the depth illusion created by the texture density gradient. Density gradients and relative densities are key features in distance perception in vertebrates. Our results suggest that they are fundamental features of vision in general, appearing also in cephalopods.     

Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion: Abortion Ethics without Metaphysics?

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper “Virtue Ethics and Abortion” that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are “in a way, fundamentally irrelevant” to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete.     

The Temporal Unfolding of Local Acoustic Information and Sentence Context

The purpose of this study was to investigate the temporal unfolding of local acoustic information and sentence context using both cross-modal interference (CMI) and word-monitoring tasks. The timing of sentence context effects have important theoretical implications for models of language processing (e.g., initial context independence vs. initial interaction). Yet, different tasks tend to yield different results. For both experiments, stimuli from an acoustically manipulated goat-to-coat continuum were embedded in sentences whose interpretation was biased toward either goat or coat. In experiment 1 (CMI), the primary task was listening to sentences for comprehension; the interference task was a word/nonword decision to an unrelated visual probe that appeared at one of three positions within the sentence. Results showed immediate effects of the acoustic manipulation, but only delayed effects of sentence context. These results were interpreted to indicate that phonological processing is initially context-independent but is followed by rapid context integration. Experiment 2 used a word-monitoring task: Response times were significantly longer when sentence context was incongruent with the monitoring target, showing an immediate effect of context. The apparently contradictory results of the two experiments together support an account of language processing in which phoneme categorization is initially independent of sentence context unless an explicit judgment about the identity of the target is required.